Take your seats, please: backstage moments from the 65th Evening Standard Theatre Awards

A very warm welcome to a very special edition of ES Magazine, celebrating the 65th Evening Standard Theatre Awards.

Even measured against a truly illustrious seven-decade history, this year’s ceremony at the London Coliseum was a remarkable as well as a delightful and ribald one. A vintage crop of winners highlighted the huge range of talent that lit up our stages this year, from veterans to newcomers, in stories that came from every tier of life around the globe.

I was delighted once again to host the sparkling evening with Dame Anna Wintour, editor in chief of Vogue and artistic director of Condé Nast, and with Helen McCrory and Damian Lewis. The talented Cush Jumbo, a quintuple-threat performer who can act, write, sing, dance and is wickedly funny, was our MC, stepping confidently into the role filled for two years by Phoebe Waller-Bridge.

If last year’s hot ticket was the fizzingly inventive Hamilton, this year’s was for a show featuring a frail and apparently forgetful woman sitting at a table and reminiscing about life under the Nazis. A German Life marked the triumphant return to the stage after 12 years of Dame Maggie Smith in a virtuoso performance that won her the Natasha Richardson Award for Best Actress. Dame Maggie began her stage career in 1952, three years before this newspaper’s theatre awards were launched by Charles Wintour, Anna’s father. She first won Best Actress in 1962 and has now won it five times — more than any other actress.

As proprietor of the Evening Standard it was my great pleasure to institute the Lebedev Award, given to an individual who has exerted great influence on the art of theatre. No one fits the bill more fully than Peter Brook, now 94 and still a vital creative force. His revolutionary invention over eight decades of work shaped the theatre we have today, and it was a joy to honour his work in the presence of his daughter Irina on the night. Another discretionary honour, the Editor’s Award, deservedly went to Sir Ian McKellen who, at 80, embarked on an exuberant nationwide tour and London run of his one-man show, to benefit theatre charities.

These talents continue to thrive because they have continued to adapt and embrace the changing culture. Theatre never stands still. Andrew Scott (he asked me not to refer to him as ‘the hot priest from Fleabag’) won Best Actor for a spectacular reinvention of Noël Coward’s Present Laughter, which added a whole new set of colours to his acting palette. Similarly, the great dramatic actress Anne-Marie Duff threw herself with abandon into Sweet Charity, winning Best Musical Performance.

The winner of the Milton Shulman Award for Best Director, Robert Icke, triumphed in a strong field with bold adapted versions of plays by Henrik Ibsen and Arthur Schnitzler. Another iconoclast, Jamie Lloyd, gave Evita a radical, sexy overhaul at Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre, winning Best Musical. Even fresher faces were recognised in the form of Emerging Talent winner Laurie Kynaston, devastating in The Son, and Jasmine Lee-Jones, who brought the online world onstage in Seven Methods Of Killing Kylie Jenner and won the Charles Wintour Award for Most Promising Playwright. Our Best Play, Lynn Nottage’s Sweat, and Bunny Christie’s award-winning design for A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Bridge Theatre, showed us unfamiliar worlds in thrillingly different ways.

I’ll be honest: the real delight of the Evening Standard Theatre Awards lies not just in recognising supreme talent but also in bringing together everyone from the rich and eternally vibrant world of London theatre for a party. Knights and dames rub shoulders with those just starting out. This year we honoured stage door-keepers and again invited drama students to enjoy the proceedings. I hope we’ll see some of them on the shortlist for the Evening Standard Theatre Awards in the future. Here’s to the next 65 years!